spx2 has asked for the
wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Hi,

I am building an application in Linux and starting
background processes like this system("perl stuff.pl &").
I am thinking about porting all of it to Windows.
Does Windows have this option of launching processes in background.
How would you do this ?
Thank you

I know Windows implements fork differently which probably explains an odd bug where the parent process hangs instead of exiting. This is fine, I kill it manually. The end result - a headless, background child process - still works fine.

Annoying side effect of Perl's fork() implementation on Windows, the PID is not valid. So I cannot keep track of it to kill the process later.

Actually, I'm a little baffled that this method works. Isn't Perl fork() on Windows supposed to simulate another process, not actually create another one? I believe it has something to do with the nature of exec().